The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Go and Do Thou Likewise

Posted on | April 25, 2022 | Comments Off on Go and Do Thou Likewise

Generally speaking, I am against environmentalists engaging in protests, but I wish more of them would emulate Colorado “activist” Wynn Bruce:

A climate activist who lit himself on fire on Earth Day outside the United States Supreme Court Building has died, according to reports.
Wynn Bruce, 50, of Boulder, Colorado, died Saturday, a day after he set himself ablaze in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Police Department told Fox News.
The incident happened around 6:30 p.m. on the plaza in front of the court building.
He was airlifted to a local hospital, where he died.
A Facebook page belonging to a person named Wynn Bruce said he was a Buddhist and a climate activist.
In 2020, Bruce left a cryptic Facebook comment that included a fire emoji and the date of his death, 4/22/2022.
A Buddhist priest from Boulder said she knew Bruce and called his death “an act of compassion.”
“This guy was my friend. He meditated with our sangha [Buddhist community],” Dr. K. Kritee wrote. “This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for at least one year.”

We need more of these “fearless acts of compassion.” As far as I’m concerned, the entire environmentalist movement could set themselves on fire in an act of mass self-immolation “to bring attention to climate crisis,” and the world would be a better place without them. Busybody nuisances, is what they are. Nobody really likes them.

Of course, there is no “green” way to light yourself on fire. Can’t do it with windmills or solar panels, so you’ll need good old fossil fuel to get the job done and, at $4.10 for a gallon of gas nowadays, this could get expensive — I mean, we’re talking tens of thousands of “activists” torching themselves, right? — but I’m pretty sure we could organize a GoFundMe campaign to cover the cost. Good-bye and good riddance — whoosh!




 

Category: Global Warming

Rule 5 Sunday: A WILD PARAGUAYAN MODEL APPEARS!

Posted on | April 25, 2022 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: A WILD PARAGUAYAN MODEL APPEARS!

— compiled by Wombat-socho

*walks in*
*drops pic of Larissa Riquelme*
*refuses to explain*
*walks out*
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1694, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

EBL: MAGA – Keep Your Friends Close, Reinheitsgebot, The Flight Attendant Season 2, Holly Maddux RIP, “Wild Thing”, Mitchell Torok & Ramona Redd, The Batman, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, Hero[ine] Of The Day, Tura Santana, and Outer Range

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: The Rest of NCIS Hawai’i, Dem Crumble Continues, Elon Makes Another Bid, Fish Pic Friday – Nicole Milisci, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Judge Strikes Down CDC Mask Mandate, Tattoo Tuesday, The Monday Morning Stimulus, and Sunday Sunrise

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

 

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Youth Gone Wild

Posted on | April 24, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Youth Gone Wild

— compiled by Wombat-socho

As I remarked yesterday, I expect to be back in the groove of daily link posts starting tomorrow, so the FMJRA should be a a tad fatter. The expansion draft in Pete’s 1969 league was yesterday, and I lost Joe Niekro to the Angels, but it could have been worse. Now it’s time to prep for the full draft, for which the date has not yet been announced.
More importantly, as observed by 357 Magnum earlier in the week, the Daley Gator got yeeted from his original site by WordPress and is now on at a backup URL. Follow him at the new location!
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

Rule 5 Sunday: All Sydney, All The Time!
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
EBL
Proof Positive

Ukraine Update
The Political Hat
EBL
357 Magnum

Ain’t I Done Told You?
DaleyGator
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

R.I.P., Another Russian General
EBL
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Not Long Before The End
A View From The Beach
EBL

Expect More Riots This Summer
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

The Weird Logic of COVID-19 Panic
DaleyGator
First Street Journal
EBL
357 Magnum

Netflix Stock Has Lost 62% This Year
Hogewash
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum

CNN+ Suddenly Becomes CNN-
DaleyGator
EBL

Racial Cult Murder in Georgia?
EBL

In The Mailbox: 04.21.22
A View From The Beach
EBL
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

In The Mailbox: 04.22.22
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending April 22:

  1.  EBL (12)
  2.  357 Magnum (8)
  3.  A View From The Beach (7)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Humans Dying in Mayor Frogface’s Town

Posted on | April 24, 2022 | Comments Off on Humans Dying in Mayor Frogface’s Town

As Chicago’s first Amphibian-American mayor, Lori Lightfoot has difficulty relating to the problems of mammals. While it may be unfair to accuse Mayor Frogface of anti-human prejudice, she just doesn’t seem to have a lot of sympathy for us warm-blooded creatures:

At least 35 people were shot, five of them fatally, Friday into Sunday morning in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.
ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times reports the weekend’s first fatal shooting occurred around 1 p.m. Saturday “in the 4700-block of South Cottage Grove Avenue.” The gunfire followed an argument.
Two men were killed in a drive-by shooting “in the 1900-block of West Garfield Boulevard” just after 7:30 p.m. One of the men was 42-years-old and the second was 48.
The weekend’s fourth fatal shooting occurred Saturday night around 11:30 p.m. Officers arrived on scene in the 6200-block of South Francisco Avenue to find 26-year-old Alexis Daniel Velazquez Guadarrama had been shot in the chest. He died at the scene.
The fifth fatal shooting of the weekend occurred at 4:45 a.m. Sunday, when a 57-year-old man was shot multiple times following an argument. The shooting occurred “in the 400-block of South Pulaski Road” and the gunmen fled the scene and remains on the loose.
Breitbart News noted 14 were shot, one fatally, in Chicago during the same time-frame — Friday into Sunday morning — last weekend.

Science has not yet solved the mystery of how frog DNA got mixed up in Lightfoot’s chromosome sequence. Meanwhile, human life has no value in Chicago. The homicide rate is slightly down so far this year, compared to 2021, which was the worst year for homicides in Chicago since 1996.




 

Category: Chicago, Crime

‘The Nicest Kid in Our Grade’

Posted on | April 24, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘The Nicest Kid in Our Grade’

Say hello to Raymond Spencer, 23, and while you’re at it, you can also say good-bye because he committed suicide after opening fire from a window of his fifth-floor apartment in D.C. near the Edmund Burke School and the University of D.C. campus. This shooting happened about 3:30 Friday afternoon in the Van Ness neighborhood, one of the nicest areas of D.C. I know the neighborhood very well, as I used to travel down Connecticut Avenue sometimes driving to work in Washington, and there’s a shopping center nearby with restaurants, etc., where at least once my family had dinner after a trip to the Washington Zoo.

When the news broke Friday of a mass shooting in D.C., I did not at first think this could be the type of “lone gunman” incident it turned out to be. I mean, it’s D.C., OK? Probably the local drug gangs having a shootout. But then I realized what neighborhood they were talking about and thought again. This ain’t the ghetto, and the fact that a school seemed to be the target made me wonder if it could be some kind of terrorist incident. Given the way these things are usually reported, the question immediately occurred to me, “One of ours or one of theirs?” Everything in journalism is now partisan, so the question was whether it was a “right-wing extremist” who could be used as a scarecrow by the Left: “See? We told those Trump voters were dangerous!”

Well, it turns out, this was apparently not a terrorist attack, nor was it politically motivated. Instead, Raymond Spencer was a random kook:

A former classmate of D.C. shooting suspect Raymond Spencer says she is struggling to understand why he shot four people on Friday, describing him as “the nicest kid in our grade.” . . .
Spencer filmed the attack and posted the horrifying footage online. He left digital breadcrumbs that investigators subsequently found, including posts on the 4chan message board saying, among other things, “Dear God please forgive me.” Spencer also edited the Edmund Burke Wikipedia page after the terrifying incident, writing, “A gunman shot at the school on April 22, 2022. The suspect is still at large.” The revised entry linked to a profile in Spencer’s name, in which he was described as “proudly uncircumcised” and an “AR-15 aficionado.”

(Uh, “proudly uncircumcised”? But never mind . . .)

Allison, who asked that her real name not be used in this article, is still trying to make sense of what happened, describing Spencer as “the nicest kid in our grade.” He had one older brother in the grade above, and a younger brother in the grade below, Allison said.
“I just wanted to make this information known because it feels like no one else has come forward,” she said. “And that’s really weird, because it’s not like he was a loner… He’s the last person I would expect to do something like this. He was the most quiet kid. He didn’t really talk a lot. But he always smiled when you talked to him. Like, this isn’t the person that I knew 10 years ago.”

(It’s always the “quiet kid,” you notice? All those teachers who gave me demerits and sent me to the principal’s office for talking too much in class owe me an apology. It was the quite kids who were the real danger, not me.)

Allison knew Spencer for three years, in grades 6 through 8. They attended the same Catholic school in Rockville, Maryland, which she said was “known for being tough in discipline, but also having really good academics.” The student body was very diverse, because tuition was more reasonable than other schools in the area, according to Allison.

(Catholic school kids — a menace to society!)

“And they took a lot of students who might be having problems in public school, like they might be getting bullied, or they might have [a learning disability],” she said. “So for example, if there was a student with ADHD, then they would be accommodated by the staff. And that’s actually part of why I was there, because my mom was worried about me getting bullied in public school. I was a shy kid. And there were a lot of kids like that.”
Spencer was the shortest kid in his class, standing eye-to-eye with Allison, who said she was five-feet tall at the time. She said he made friends easily with others at school, which was small enough that “everyone knew each other.” Still, Allison said Spencer “didn’t really socialize with people,” although he didn’t exhibit any violent tendencies and “nothing really stood out about him.”
After 8th grade, Spencer transferred to a public high school, where he ran cross country. The next time Allison saw him, he was being named on TV as the suspect in a mass shooting.
In a photo of Spencer’s apartment released by the Metro PD, a picture hanging on the wall appeared to depict Yakub, a mythical Black scientist written about by Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, which has now been mockingly turned into an anti-Black meme by 4chan denizens.

(OK, that’s kind of weird, but too vague to be a real clue.)

Allison said she isn’t sure if Spencer got caught up in one of “these different movements, [like] the incel thing,” but added, “I don’t think it was really that deep.”

(Y’know, “the incel thing” crossed my mind as soon as I saw the shooter’s mug shot. Kind of gave off an Elliot Rodger vibe somehow.)

“I’m pretty sure he already wanted to commit suicide, but he was afraid of not being remembered,” she said. “So he appealed to these internet movements because he knew that people would continue to make conspiracies about his life, as if it was some kind of thing. The truth is kind of devastatingly simple.”
Spencer’s actions were “really cynical,” said Allison, noting that she understands “he did commit something really evil.”
“But it doesn’t help to demonize people,” she said, sobbing quietly. “Because it came from somewhere. And as long as we don’t try to understand other people, this kind of thing will keep happening in this country.”

OK, we could “try to understand other people,” or we could pay people to understand them — professional psychiatrists, for example, working in mental institutions where we lock up these lunatics so they can’t hurt anybody. We are currently about 50 years into an experiment of “disinstitutionalizing” the mentally ill, and there are so many kooks running around nowadays that scarcely a week goes by without one of them doing something crazy like this. But the good news, such as it is, is that at least none of Raymond Spencer’s victims died from their wounds, and he committed suicide, thus sparing taxpayers the expense of locking him away for the rest of his life. A win-win, really.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime

Here’s a Completely Crazy Idea

Posted on | April 23, 2022 | Comments Off on Here’s a Completely Crazy Idea

Look, I know this might seem far-fetched, but hear me out. Maybe if you’re going to have a meeting of your army commanders, you should try to choose a location that is not within range of the enemy’s artillery:

Two Russian generals have been killed by a Ukrainian artillery strike on a forward command-and-control center of Russia’s 49th General Army near the frontlines in Kherson region, with a third severely wounded, Ukraine’s military intelligence said on April 23.
“As a result of the strike, command-and-control center 49A was destroyed, two enemy generals were liquidated, another one was evacuated in critical condition,” reads a Ukrainian military intelligence statement.
The identities of the Russian officers in question are still being confirmed.
Ukraine’s military intelligence is continuing to isolate high-value targets for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to eliminate.
This puts the tally of Russian generals killed in Ukraine at 10. Meanwhile, Moscow has officially acknowledged the death of only two of them: Andrey Sukhovetskiy and major-general Vladimir Frolov.

Now, apparently I’ve lost count, because the last time I checked — it was last Sunday — the death toll of Russian generals was seven. Adding these two latest would put the total at nine, but maybe they killed another one somewhere that I didn’t count. Anyway, the bodies of dead Russian generals are stacking up like cordwood, and we’re only two months into this war. At this rate, pretty soon there won’t be enough Russian generals left alive to stage a coup to overthrow Putin.




 

Category: Russia, Ukraine

‘The Enormity of the Crime’

Posted on | April 23, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘The Enormity of the Crime’

One of the things I’ve always understood about what is now generally called “the LGBTQ movement” (once known more simply as “gay rights”) was that it really wasn’t about fighting oppression, and that the claims of victimhood involved were largely fictitious. And I knew this because I actually knew gay people, none of whom were in the least bit oppressed or victimized, despite the fact that they lived in the heart of the Bible Belt. It is not necessary for me to cite examples, although i could name names of these friends and acquaintances who didn’t parade around proclaiming themselves to be oppressed victims because (a) there was no political advantage to be had by making such claims in the Deep South three or four decades ago, and (b) they weren’t victims in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not until the 1990s, really, that the gay rights movement began to get much traction in popular culture, probably as a result, on the one hand, of the AIDS epidemic creating a crisis atmosphere and, on the other hand, the Democratic Party trying to find political leverage against the “Religious Right.” Prior to the Clinton administration, really, most people had a basic libertarian attitude toward homosexuality — even if they did not approve of such behavior, they didn’t go snooping around trying to “out” people or otherwise make a big scene about it.

Beginning in 1993, after Bill Clinton turned gays-in-the-military into an issue, a new stance of radical gay activism became apparent, which was anathema to the old libertarian live-and-let-live attitude. Suddenly demands were being made, and if you didn’t agree with the policies being advocated, you were accused of ignorance and hatred — “homophobia”!

The suffix “-phobia” amounts to a diagnosis of mental illness, an accusation that one is motivated by irrational fear, and to inject this into public policy debates is evidence of the worst sort of bad faith. Never mind, of course, the fictional nature of the claims of “oppression” made by gay rights activists which, as I say, is my basic disagreement with the movement in general. Because the gay people I knew were not remotely in a situation of oppression comparable to, e.g., black people living under Jim Crow, I was not interested in any lectures about how their “rights” were allegedly being violated. The accusations of “ignorance,” “hate” and “homophobia” were just icing on this gigantic cake of obnoxious activism.

If it is your goal to persuade me, do not begin your argument by insulting me. Bogus accusations of “ignorance” — do I seem ignorant to you? — are habitually hurled by liberals who don’t seem to care whom they are insulting by such claims, or what the consequences may be. Certainly I don’t think I am alone in this attitude. There must be lots of people who never had any malice toward gay people and who, indeed, may be deeply sympathetic to the various problems afflicting gay people, but who simply don’t think that politics is the solution to such problems. Is such a believe “ignorant”? Is it not possible that an honest and intelligent person may evaluate the matter of homosexuality in its entirety, weighing and considering the various aspects of the issues involved, and simply decide that the policies advocated by “gay rights” activists are generally wrong?

Having spent the past couple of decades closely watching how liberals operate, I have long since realized that unless you learn to shrug off accusations of “hate” and “ignorance” from the Left, you’re going to be bullied into submission — or, at the very least, intimidated into silence, which is effectively the same. While I don’t go around starting arguments with people, neither will I be forced to sit in silence while liberals lecture me as if I were a child in need of their tutelage. As folks say down home, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night, and I am in no need of instruction on this issue. Neither is Jeremy Carl:

Groomers.
It’s the word of the month, which the Right is applying increasingly to our leftist political establishment.
Perhaps the best response to the groomer debate came from Helena Kirschner, a woman who detransitioned (that is, she spent years as “transgender man” before later accepting her birth sex) and has become an influential voice speaking up against transgender ideology:
“There’s a place for precise terminology,” she tweeted. “There’s also a place for memetic terms that convey a difficult to articulate concept in a way many people can intuitively understand. ‘Groomer’ applied to teachers & other adults who manipulate kids into gender confusion accomplishes this.”
And that is exactly right. It’s difficult for us to acknowledge the enormity of the crime that has been committed against our children because it’s hard for us to acknowledge how deeply we have failed. And it’s hard for us to accept that this crime is taking place with the full support of the leadership of one of America’s major political parties and most of the medical establishment. . . .
The mass grooming of our children into pediatric transgenderism and other confused gender identities is a crime of world-historical proportions, a crime which dare not speak its name.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) You see that Helena Kirschner cannot be accused of “ignorance” about transgenderism, having been through the experience herself. One imagines that this experience has provided her with ironclad immunity against such insults masquerading as “arguments.” Recall that I featured Kirschner here last month:

Helena Kerschner is not an unattractive woman. She has a certain pre-Raphaelite beauty — the kind of face you might find in a Rossetti painting — and yet she spent her adolescence feeling ugly:

By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder. In eighth grade, I lost touch with most of my school friends, and was too self-conscious and preoccupied with my eating disorder to put myself out there again. I started skipping school, spending lunch in the bathroom, and in general just keeping my head down, trying to get through the day unnoticed.

She found a “community” in the Internet’s septic tank — Tumblr:

Between sharing photos, drawings, and fanfiction, these girls were posting about their lives and going into deep detail about their struggles. Many were social outcasts like me, also struggling with things like self-harm and eating disorders. Finding a community of such like minded people felt amazing, and I quickly began spending nearly every waking moment on Tumblr or messaging some friend I had met on there.

The self-selecting nature of online communities is insufficiently understood. To be part of such a “community,” after all, you have to spend a lot of time online, whether it’s ranting about politics on Twitter or sharing “fanfiction” on Tumblr. And the people who become obsessed with this — the core of any such online community — tend to be “social outcasts” who lack healthy real-world connections with actual human beings. . . .

The point is that such people are vulnerable, and transgender activists seek to exploit that vulnerability in a predatory way. It should not be necessary to explain what’s wrong with such exploitation, and the fact that the providers of government-imposed “education” now wish to direct these efforts at kindergartners ought to outrage every sensible American. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are not very sensible — Joe Biden got 81 million votes — and thus those of us who haven’t completely lost our minds find ourselves as an embattled minority, arguing against lunatics.

But don’t get me started on David French . . .




 

Category: The Transgender Cult

Disney Got Woke, Now Going Broke

Posted on | April 23, 2022 | Comments Off on Disney Got Woke, Now Going Broke

Disney’s decision to declare war on Florida parents could not have come at a worse moment for the company, which has been struggling:

The Walt Disney Co. is the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the past year, plummeting 31 percent in the last 12 months.
Of the 30 companies that comprise the Dow, Disney has seen its stock drop the most on a percentage basis, followed by 3M, which is down 25 percent, and Home Depot, down 23 percent.
Disney shares were down more than 5 percent Wednesday as investors remained skittish on streaming entertainment companies following Netflix’s disastrous first quarter results. Disney+ subscription results recently disappointed Wall Street when the company reported quarterly results in November, causing the stock to tumble.
The Mouse House also faces difficulties in Florida, where the state senate voted on Wednesday to pass a measure that would deprive Disney World in Orlando of its self-governing status. . . .
Disney’s free fall comes as the company has embraced woke, far-left politics, specifically the exposure of young children to radical LGBTQ ideology. In so doing, the entertainment giant has alienated millions of customers and picked a fight with Florida GOP leaders.

While correlation does not necessarily prove causation, the two phenomena — getting woke and going broke — are not coincidentally related. They are the product of corporate culture defined by insularity and arrogance, when management lets itself become isolated in an echo chamber of sycophants (“Great idea, boss!”) and begins ignoring the basic principles of customer service. The Disney “brand” was originally synonymous with wholesome family entertainment suitable for kids, but as their empire expanded, management lost sight of this brand value and began craving approval from their Hollywood peers.

Why else would they let themselves be pushed by a bunch of radical LGBTQ activists into a culture war battle against Florida parents? The desire to be seen as “sensitive” to the demands of these fringe activists (who certainly are not part of Disney’s core audience) was allowed to override basic marketing considerations. The war against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill was essentially a partisan Democrat propaganda operation, a preemptive effort to take out Gov. Ron DeSantis as a 2024 presidential candidate. Given which way the political winds are blowing (e.g., last year’s defeat of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia), did it make sense for Disney to jump into such a fight? Disney pandering to the “Drag Queen Story Hour” crowd makes as much sense, marketing-wise, as Golden Corral trying to pander to radical vegans. If sanity had prevailed at Disney HQ, they would have ignored the demands that they join the Democrats’ thinly veiled partisan war against DeSantis.

Instead, at a time when the competition for the online streaming audience should have been the focus of Disney’s organizational efforts, they let themselves be distracted by a propaganda campaign that, while it might not be the cause of Disney’s problems, is certainly not a solution to those problems. We see a similar narrative unwinding at Netflix and CNN, two other brands that have gone the same way.

“Get woke, go broke” — it’s a guaranteed formula for failure.

Ed Driscoll quotes Ace of Spades: “Has corporate America started to get the message that it is no longer a cost-free move to always side with the exotic flora of the extreme left? And that maybe just staying out of politics and making business the business of business is the better path?” They won’t learn anything until they’re bankrupted and ruined.




 

Category: Hollywood, Media Bias
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